Arts, Briefly

Compiled by Lawrence Van Gelder

Published: January 11, 2007

William Boyd Novel Honored

William Boyd's ''Restless'' has won the new Costa prize for novels, previously known as the Whitbread Novel Award. Mr. Boyd, who won the Whitbread First Novel Award for ''A Good Man in Africa'' (1981), will receive £5,000 (about $9,700) and become eligible, with winners in four other categories, for the 2006 Costa Book of the Year prize, to be announced in London on Feb. 7. The awards honor books of the last year by writers based in Britain and Ireland. ''Restless,'' published in the United States by Bloomsbury, tells of an aging British woman who reveals to her daughter that she was a counterintelligence operative.

No Burial Yet For James Brown

James Brown, who died at 73 on Christmas Day, remains unburied while lawyers and his children seek to settle issues pertaining to his estate, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Brown, the ''Godfather of Soul,'' lies in a sealed coffin in a temperature-controlled, guarded room in his home on Beech Island, S.C., said Charles Reid, manager of the C. A. Reid Funeral Home in Augusta, Ga., which handled the services. Buddy Dallas, a lawyer for the singer's estate, said on Tuesday that Mr. Brown's children and the trustees under his will, which had not been filed, would determine the burial site.

Bonnaroo Site Bought

Organizers of the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival announced yesterday that they had bought a major portion of the farm site outside Nashville where the popular annual rock-and-country-and-anything-else event is held. The 530-acre purchase includes all of the performance areas and much of the camping and parking area, they said. The festival will continue to lease an additional 250 acres used for parking and camping. Besides becoming the permanent home of the Bonnaroo festival, to be held this year from June 14 to 17, the site will be used for various other events.

Celebrities Plead Not Guilty

A lawyer for George Michael, 43, the former Wham! frontman, denied yesterday in a London court that his client was unfit to drive and in possession of marijuana after being found slumped over the wheel of his car in October, The Associated Press reported. Mr. Michael, above left, was not present. A court official said that the case would resume on March 7 and that a trial date had been set for April 23. In a Los Angeles court, a lawyer for Paris Hilton, 25, entered a plea of not guilty on Tuesday, four months after she was charged with driving under the influence. The police said she had been driving ''erratically'' through Hollywood. Ms. Hilton, above right, a star of the television series ''The Simple Life,'' was not in court. A pretrial hearing was scheduled for Jan. 23.

Footnotes

The Hollywood Foreign Press Association and the Internal Revenue Service announced yesterday that they had reached agreement on tax liabilities related to the gift boxes distributed by the association to presenters at its Golden Globes Awards. Under the agreement, the association settled obligations with respect to boxes given through 2005. Recipients of 2006 boxes will be given tax forms and will be responsible for their taxes. No boxes will be given this year. Richard Gere, who played a man whose heart was won by a prostitute in the 1990 film ''Pretty Woman,'' cheered some 10,000 Indian prostitutes as they danced to raunchy Bollywood songs yesterday at a Mumbai fairground, where he urged them to refuse sex without condoms to prevent the spread of H.I.V./AIDS, Reuters reported. ''No condom, no sex,'' he yelled into a microphone. ''No condom, no sex.''